SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The women’s basketball team at Mission College expected the bleachers to be full and the hecklers ready when its newest player made her home court debut.

In the days leading up to the game, people had plenty to say about 6-foot-6-inch, 220-pound Gabrielle Ludwig, who joined the Lady Saints as a mid-season walk-on and became, according to advocates, the first transsexual to play college hoops as both a man and a woman.

Okay. I admire the whole pioneering spirit and all that, but I’m having a hard time celebrating any “first” that involves getting your dick butterflied and mangled into a misshapen horror of a fake vagina as a prerequisite.

But maybe that’s just me.

Also, this manimal is 50 years old. FIFTY. And playing college hoops. Does that strike anyone as a bit of activism on the place of the coach?

Cafferata is tactful when asked whether Ludwig’s size and former gender give the Saints an unfair advantage. A self-described champion of underdogs — his roster includes a player who is deaf and others with learning disabilities — the coach is rooting for Ludwig all the way.

Yeah. I’m thinking “asked and answered.” But that’s merely where the horror show begins. In its quest to bend over backwards to treat anyone’s aberrant pathology as perfectly mainstream, the NCAA now has specific fucking rules governing boys who want to tuck their shit back and pretend they’re a lady.

As someone living as a woman and taking female hormones since 2007, Ludwig was eligible to play in the NCAA. Transgender student athletes who have taken medication to suppress testosterone for a year may compete on women’s teams under a policy adopted last year.

The California Community College Athletic Association had another hoop for Ludwig. Because its rules base gender on a student’s birth certificate, she would need a new one. Ludwig, who had sex reassignment surgery over the summer, petitioned a judge and obtained her papers on Nov. 30.

Fuckin’ A, buddy. Now we’re getting somewhere. I want you to read those last two sentences again. You now have the ability to rewrite history if you get a lopitoffamy and some bolt-on titties. This dude was born a male. That. Happened.

But now it can get an official birth certificate that says, no, in 1962, this person wasn’t born a male, it was born a female. And we wonder why there seems to be a surfeit of fucking nutjobs running around these days. Maybe it’s because we’re telling them they don’t have a problem, it’s US that needs to pretend up is down and black is white. Because God forbid we mention that the emperor has no clothes. Or a garbled junkpile that used to be a penis.

“I got exactly what I always wanted, just to fit in and be normal like everyone else,” Ludwig said.

No, dude. You got everyone to pretend that you’re normal. There’s a difference.